Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part VI/XII: the Valentinians
The decline of High Imperial culture coincided with a shifting of the Empire’s economic center of gravity back South and East. As a result of the regional climate shifting to a much wetter, colder phase during the fourth century, the center of population of the Roman Empire (and, needless to say, of the barbarians) in the fourth century moved gradually away from its early third century Northern and Western crest. Rural population growth was particularly notable in Syria, Palestine, Western North Africa, and Southern Gaul. Despite its wars, the age of Constantine and Constans generally saw an expansion in settlement relative to the days of Aurelian and Carus in all areas of the Empire, even the Rhine frontier. Though becoming influenced by the Roman periphery less, Italian culture was influencing the rest of the Empire more. The civilized regions of the Roman Empire were becoming so culturally similar to Italy that the Empire was now referred to by the common people with a new term – “Romania”. Today, “Romania” tends to be called by metonyms – generally either “Rome” or “Byzantium”. This is useful enough when the Mediterraneans of the third to fifth century called themselves “Romans”, but not as useful when the Greek-speakers of the ninth century called themselves “Romans”, as well. I thus refer to the first as “Late Antique Romans”, “Romano-Mediterraneans” or “Great Romans”, since they were great in number, while I refer to the second as “Lesser Romans” or “Medieval East Romans”, as they were confined to a territory lesser in extent. Though unromanized peoples such as the Isaurians, Basques, Moors, Jews, Samaritans, and highland Britons and Sardinians persisted within the borders of the Empire, the fourth and early fifth centuries marked a peak in its inhabitants’ use of Latin due to the rise of Constantinople and the decline of the old Celtic languages (Cambridge Ancient History 14, p. 872). In the East, Greek was replacing Aramaic as the lingua franca. Throughout most of the fourth century, Hispania, Britain, and the portions of Gaul unaffected by the barbarians all participated in this process of Romanization, a process encouraged by their monetary economy becoming larger than ever before in their history. As Michael Kulikowski writes in his Imperial Tragedy
Regions that are today sparsely inhabited and relatively poor were rich, their agricultural wealth exploited by a wealthy landowning elite: the Portuguese Alentejo, for instance – now one of the modern country’s least populous and poorest regions, with limited agriculture and even less tourism – was then peppered with hundreds of rural sites, some of them true palaces, set among diverse croplands and vineyards. Sicily, perennially among modern Italy’s poorest and least tractable provinces, was at the end of the fourth century a paradise of senatorial wealth. The villa of Casale at Piazza Armerina, built earlier in the century and flourishing at this time, contains some of the most spectacular mosaics to survive from antiquity – amazingly detailed hunting scenes, erotic depictions of sporting women, and so on, across dozens of public and private rooms, covering thousands of square metres. Sites of elaborate rural display are found in many other unlikely places as well – Herefordshire and Gloucestershire in western England, the Cantabrian coast along the Bay of Biscay, the fertile plains around Lake Balaton in Hungary. Only in northern Gaul is there evidence for a decline in prosperity.
SOURCES: Theodosian Code, Ammianus Marcellinus, Aurelius Victor, Themistius, Libanius, Julian
The relative imperial prosperity between 324 and 376 was punctuated by six to eight civil wars. After the death of Constantine in 337, one thousand years prior to the fall of Nikomedia to the Turks, the Empire was divided for a third time, this time among his sons, Constantine II, a trinitarian Christian aged 20, in Gaul, Britain, and Hispania, Constans, a trinitarian Christian aged 14, in Italy and the Roman Southwest, and Constantius II, a non-trinitarian Christian aged 19, in the Eastern Empire. The division was based on a massacre of potential successors planned by either the army (according to Aurelius Victor) or Constantius II, the primary beneficiary of the arrangement (according to Kulikowski). It was this hereditary succession that was the first hint of the unraveling of the Dominate and the beginning of the Crisis of the Fifth Century, and likely was the beginning of the decline in Roman military capability that would become undeniable by end of the first decade of the fifth century. After increasing disputes over spheres of responsibility, Constantine II invaded Italy in 340 and was killed that year in a battle with Constans outside Aquileia, thus resulting in the unification of the Western Empire. Constans and Constantius II continued on Constantine’s path of Christianization and social conservatism; same-sex marriage was outlawed in 342. Constans, however, was overthrown by Magentius, a Gallic usurper, in 350. The Alamans took advantage of the extensive and bloody Roman civil war of 350-53 to raid as far as Autun, resulting in the closing of the Trier mint and requiring assaults by Julian the Apostate against the invaders in 357. Magnentius was defeated by by Constantius II, the least remembered of the four great Byzantine unifiers of the East and West (Constantine I, Constantius II, Theodosius I, and Justinian I) in 353. It was Constantius II who erected the last major surviving secular monument of the City of Rome during his visit to the city in 357. He also convened numerous church councils at (variously) Sirmium, Philippopolis (against the Council of Serdica, which adopted trinitarian stances), Seleucia, Milan, Arles, Ariminum, and even Constantinople against the Great Eastern Roman father Athanasius of Alexandria and his doctrine of the Trinity and the identical substance of the Father and the Son. In 360-61 Julian the Apostate, born in Constantinople and the last Roman emperor to not be a Christian, rose up against Constantius II and became best known for his humiliating defeat in Iraq in 363 and his being the last of the six legitimate emperors from the Constantinian dynasty. It was in his reign the famous Eastern earthquake of 363 took place. His death in Iraq resulted in the brief rise of Jovian, who, after signing a humiliating peace agreement with Persia, restored state subsidies to the churches and burned the library of Antioch for its being a den of paganism.
SOURCES: Theodosian Code, De rebus bellicis, Ammianus Marcellinus, Themistius, Symmachus, Sozomen, Socrates, Theodoret
Jovian died the following year at the age of 33 and the Empire was split for a fourth time in 364 by his successor, Valentinian I, a commander of an elite infantry unit, between himself and his brother, Valens, both born in Vinkovci, Croatia. The first brother would die a natural death after eleven years of rule; the second would be killed by the Goths and Alans at Hadrianopolis after fourteen. They would be the last Roman emperors to still express some degree of religious tolerance toward non-trinitarians and pagans, though they still continued on the course of Christianization and social conservatism followed by their predecessors. Indeed, Valentinian I was the first recorded Roman emperor to use the word “pagan”, meaning “rustic”, in the religious sense; the word had spread into wide use by Roman Christians just a decade or two before. Their time would be known for its remarkable “long peace”, with only two civil wars, the first with Procopius, a member of the Constantinian dynasty who seized power in Constantinople in 365 and whose Goth-backed revolt took less than a year to quell, the second with Firmus, a Moorish noble who seized power in Tunisia and Algeria six years after the defeat of Procopius, but minted no coins, suggesting fairly unimpressive ambitions. Firmus fled to the Moors soon after the Roman army was sent against him from Arles and committed suicide in 375 after his revolt was quelled with the support of his brother, Gildo, who rose to increasingly high rank during the two decade-long period of rising prosperity following the suppression of the uprising. All this is told in the history of Ammianus Marcellinus.
The remonetization of government finance begun under Constantine, serfization of the economy begun under Diocletian, and neglect of the City of Rome to focus on the frontier begun in the third century continued apace under Valentinian and Valens. These brothers finally ended the minting of billon coinage, which had been debased by their predecessors into worthlesness. Instead, they preferred to mint a very widely produced and balanced mix of gold, silver, and bronze. This was done in order to begin commuting payments in kind into payments made in money, a process intended to reduce administrative overhead that would be continued and expanded by their successors. In order to encourage this process, the Valentinians reversed Constantine’s and his immediate successors’ attempts to debase the solidus and restored it to a coin of 99.5% pure gold. They also banned the sale of slaves apart from the land they cultivated and strengthened restrictions against tenant farmers leaving their land without their landlords’ consent, thus turning the entire landless population of the Empire, whether slave or free, into de facto serfs. To prevent miscegenation, marriages between Romans and barbarians were prohibited on penalty of death (Theodosian Code 3.14). To conserve government expenditure and discourage senatorial independence, Valentinian also banned the construction of new monumental buildings in the City of Rome. However, old monuments were still preserved; the Pons Cestius was rebuilt under Valentinian I.
The brothers were still, first and foremost, warriors. Valens was usually not in the second Rome, but either in Antioch or near the Danube front. The Western imperial residence under Valentinian moved back, as was proper to defend against the increasingly severe German threat, to Trier in the Rhineland. Valentinian made numerous campaigns into the lands of the Alamans, which ended their raids for a third of a century. Wars were also fought under Valentinian I on the middle Danube frontier against the rebellious Quadi; Valentinian I himself died of a stroke while on the middle Danube frontier negotiating with the Quadi. The ambitions of the two brothers against the barbarians were, unlike those of Maximinus Thrax or Octavius, limited; Halsall has pointed out, fourth century emperors, with the exception of Julian, engaged in cross-border campaigns only in areas where a Roman road network had already been built under the High Empire.
Despite the Roman military probably being weaker than at the beginning of the century and the Balkans and especially Rhineland being in a much worse state, the Valentinian age saw renewed military activity in the Rhine-Danube frontier, parts of Palestine, and even Libya, which had been abandoned by the Romans since the days of Diocletian. However, there are signs of military slackening. Betthoro in Jordan serves as an example. In the mid-fourth century, eight sixteen room blocks (equivalent to one vexillation of 512 men if four men lived in each room) disappeared; the other four blocks of sixteen rooms were made larger and two such blocks were now made to have only fourteen rooms (one block of eight rooms and another of ten was added, making just under 200 rooms in total -just under 2/3 of the base’s original capacity). The total number of people at the base, assuming an increase in room capacity by one person per room, appears to have dropped either from 1500 to 1200 or from 1200 to 1000. Assuming an increase in room capacity from four to six people, it stayed constant at 1200. Assuming four men per room (it could have been five, but no more) and that virtually all rooms have been uncovered, this implies some 1200 men per legion -very much consistent with the textual sources.
The fourth century Roman Empire was a very different Roman Empire from that prevailing in the first and second. The earlier empire was confronted by continually less frequent internal ethnic rebellions, the later, despite having almost no ethnic rebellions, was frequently torn by civil war; the earlier Empire had secure frontiers, the frontiers of the latter were rather porous; the earlier empire was expanding in territory, the later empire’s borders were either stable or contracting into its core provinces; the earlier empire frequently went on expeditions far outside its borders, the later empire did so increasingly rarely; the earlier Empire’s economic center was moving further and further into the North and West, the later Empire’s was continuously moving Southward and Eastward; the earlier empire was polytheistic, the later empire was rapidly Christianizing; the earlier empire had relentless and ubiquitous monumental construction and sculpture, the earlier empire had very little outside walls, water systems, and churches; the earlier empire had strong city councils, those of the later empire were notoriously weak, the earlier empire was ruled by the Senatorial aristocracy, the later Empire was ruled by the military and Senators were prohibited from military roles; the earlier empire had realistic art, the art of the later empire was substantially less realistic; the earlier empire was ruled primarily by Italians, the later primarily by Illyrians; the earlier Empire had very little bureaucracy, the later Empire had a great deal; the earlier empire was highly politically centralized around Rome, the later empire tended to be highly politically decentralized; the earlier Empire still had a concept of “Roman” as distinct from a typical inhabitant of the Mediterranean, the later Empire, with the ancient Gauls, Greeks, and Romans all extinct peoples, had none; the hereditary principle as a rule for succession was only beginning to be established by the end of the earlier empire, it was, with few exceptions, a firm rule in the later; the earlier empire had the highest philosophic, technological, cartographic, and scientific development in the whole of human history prior to the later Middle Ages; the later had these to a much lesser extent; the earlier empire was on a silver standard, the later on a gold standard, the earlier had a primarily free peasantry, the later ubiquitous serfdom.
SOURCES: Ammianus Marcellinus
As the Empire was growing weaker, the barbarians were growing stronger. Under the High Empire, the lands between the Rhine and the region of Kharkov outside the Empire’s administration held a population roughly one twentieth that of the Empire. In the second and third centuries, this ratio began to change in northerners’ favor. As Thomas Burns writes in his Rome and the Barbarians (p. 289),
Through the reign of Alexander Severus trade across the frontiers was clearly robust with a wide variety of items being exchanged. This trade, including various types of ceramic and glassware, continued through all but the bleakest decades of the third century. Roman soldiers were active economically in barbaricum and conversely barbarians participated in Roman regional markets, where they recycled some of their Roman coins. Even Roman weapons turn up occasionally in barbaricum, despite much prohibitive legislation. In the worst hit areas all of this economic interdependence ended for a matter of about four decades, approximately the normal male life expectancy.
As a result of over two centuries of contact with the Roman world, Greater Germany, formerly utterly barbaric and sparsely populated due to its inhabitants’ prior inability to use the wealth of their soil, increased very strongly in industry, trade, battlefield capability, and, especially in the East, population. In the mid-second century, as a result of the heavy swivel-plough being introduced from High Roman self-sufficient peasants to the barbarians beyond the frontier, Germanic tribes in northern Germany and Poland began to expand out of their ancient habitat. They spread their seed far to the South and East. The late second century wars of the Marcomanni and Costoboci were the first hint of this; by the year 320, all of Poland, Slovakia, Western Ukraine, Moldova, Romania –even Crimea and southwestern Belarus- were dominated by a Germanic upper caste -if not wholly in blood, then certainly in language. The rise of the majority-Gothic Chernyakhov culture (transliteration varies enormously- either search the more consistently spelled Przeworsk culture to the northwest of this and go off that or just search “Goths“) in present-day Romania, Moldova, and Western Ukraine in the third and fourth centuries is the firmest proof of this. The Goths in present-day Romania were finally crushed by Constantine in 332, resulting in a decisive peace which granted the Goths subsidy payments in exchange for open trade with the Empire, peace on the frontier, and a regular supply of men to fight in Roman wars. A few years after this, a chiefdom of Vandals from northeastern Hungary and eastern Slovakia which requested refuge from Gothic attacks from the North and East was settled in Roman Pannonia without issue, just as many barbarian chiefdoms had been settled into the Empire for centuries. After thirty years of peace, the Goths in present-day Romania rose up in 364, but were pacified by Valens with a less decisive and more isolationist treaty in 369, as the revival of Persian attacks forced the Roman East to cut the Gothic war short.
The fourth century was a world in which just five great empires -Rome, Jin China, Persia, the Guptas, Aksum- ruled over 70% of the 200 million or so people of the Old World. The barbarian settlements of Scotland, Denmark, Ireland, the lands of the Vandals, the Moorish chiefdoms, the cities of Arabia, even Aksum continued to absorb Roman culture throughout early Late Antiquity. By the year 350, the Germanic lands from the Rhine to the region of Kharkov had expanded to a population roughly one tenth that of the Roman Empire, or roughly equivalent to that of Roman Italy. Half that population was controlled by Gothic chiefdoms, which were substantially more politically and economically developed than those of the relatively few and barbarous Franks, Burgundians, Alamans, Picts, Scots, and Saxons, all but the last two of which are first known to have appeared in Roman sources during the third century (the Saxons and Scots first appear in the fourth). The largest settlements in Germany near the Gallo-Raetian frontier reached some 500 people. In contrast, the largest Gothic settlement in today’s Moldova, Budesty, contained some five thousand people, while quite a few others could be found that were about half to a third as large. As Kulikowski writes,
In the Cernjachov regions, a new and increasingly homogeneous archaeological culture came into being during the third century, oriented towards the harvesting, storage, and redistribution of agricultural products. Along the Rhine and Upper Danube, by contrast, there is no visible break in the archaeological culture of the third century, when such new ethnic names as those of the Franks and Alamanni begin to dominate our sources. On the other hand, the excavation of cemeteries and settlements in ever greater numbers seems to confirm the same picture of growing social differentiation, while fortifications within the abandoned Roman limes of Upper Germany and Raetia (e.g., the Glauberg and the Gelbe Burg) were definitely turned into barbarian strongholds during the third century.
In terms of civilizational development, Gothia as of 350 had become roughly equivalent to present-day northern England or Morocco during the first century BC. By about 350, there were perhaps three million Goths, half a million Alamans, half a million Vandals, two hundred thousand Franks, two hundred thousand Saxons, a hundred fifty thousand Burgundians, two or three hundred thousand inhabitants of Scandinavia, a hundred thousand or so assorted Germanic inhabitants of the Baltic, perhaps a hundred thousand Thuringians, and perhaps half a million Germanic people of other tribes (e.g., the Quadi, a group that lived to the South of the Vandals) -in all, five or six million Germans. The tendency for Germanic population near the Rhine frontier to increase was greatly reduced by the Empire in two respects: the Empire provided an attractive outlet for Germanic migrants and it made the crystallization of any powerful Germanic kingdom bordering the Rhine impossible. The same held true for the country of the Scots and Picts -the success of imperial frontier management for the second made them among the only major groups to experience a decrease in Roman goods inflows between the second and fourth centuries.
By the second half of the fourth century, Late Roman culture was increasingly penetrating into areas of West Germany outside Roman control, while at the very same time the tendency of Germans in the Roman empire to change their names to Roman ones became increasingly rare, especially outside the officer corps (Thomas S. Burns, Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C.–A.D. 400, p. 352-361). From at least the Marcomannic wars on, men born in Greater Germany became dramatically overrperesented in the Roman military due to constant Germanic immigration into the Roman Empire. About a quarter of Roman field soldiers were of barbarian origin. In the Rhineland, German tribes defeated by the Romans became allies responsible for border defense, a process that was only encouraged by the royal treasury being flush with gold. It was known at the time that the northern barbarians made the best soldiers in regard to at least physical features and courage; today, the northern barbarians having civilized for quite some time, it is accepted from sound experience that the Finns, the most remote of the northern barbarians in Roman times, followed by Greater Germans, followed by the West Slavs and Balts simply make the best soldiers and especially the best commanders in all aspects of war with the possible exception of courage, while those from the long civilized regions (Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Greece, South Italy, etc.), with the possible exception of Turkey, simply lag behind in all areas of warfare, including strategy and tactics, which was thought to be a weakness of the northern barbarians in Roman times, but this surely had institutional causes far more than genetic. Other than for institutional factors, there is no reason to think this was not the case during the second to fifth centuries, and, thus, no reason to think that, aside from institutional factors (for which Romanized Illyrians and Romanized Celts were primarily responsible until the 390s), the Germanization of the Western Roman military was not simply an outright boon for the Empire. The distinction between Roman and German was declining by the decade. Indeed, as Kulikowski points out, the distinction between Roman and non-Roman was declining by the decade, as the fourth century for the first time saw a large influx of elites from outside the Empire, whether Gothic, Persian, Frankish, or Axumite, into the Roman ruling class (on this, see his Imperial Triumph) at the same time as the distinction between the Senatorial and equestrian courses of officeholding became finally merged under Constantine. It is from this fact the idea comes that the Roman Empire fell because it was too tolerant of outsiders, and while this is correct for the special case of Italy (Odoacer, the Burgundians, and the Ostrogoths were all outsiders accepted by Romans to fight in their wars), it is always important to remember the Visigoths, Franks, Sueves, and Vandals were uninvited guests capable of beating the Romans in battle head on, that the Empire’s loss of Britain was purely a Hispano-British affair, and that the Eastern Empire successfully avoided the Germanization proccess that plagued Italy despite being open to outsiders.
As Germany increasingly culturally Romanized, the Roman-held Rhineland, due to Germanic raiding during the Empire’s constant civil wars, became increasingly culturally barbarized. From the beginning of the fourth century onwards, as a result of Germanic raids, agriculture in the Rhineland and Ardennes increasingly became cultivated from strongholds, as was the case before and after Roman rule. The open countryside in the Rhineland and the portions of southern Germany north of the Inn river became largely depopulated by the second half of the fourth century, with residential structures in the villas disappearing or becoming repurposed (see Bender, H. “Archaeological Perspectives on Rural Settlement in Late Antiquity in the Rhine and Danube Areas.”, p. 191-3). Throughout much of the Rhine frontier, one might, in any part of the second half of the fourth century, look on the Roman side, then look on the German, and see hardly a difference in the inhabitants’ mode of living other than the greater scale of the Roman settlements.
At least in the fourth century, however, the situations south of the river Inn and in the vicinity of Trier were not nearly as deplorable. Despite all the damage these bands of Germanic raiders did to the Rhineland’s internal security, they never made their way into the interior of Gaul or Italy between the Crisis of the Third Century and the start of the fifth century. The fourth century situation along the Danube, at least, was not all bad; the Pannonian Limes were constructed in the first half of the fourth century and Roman watchtowers were constructed beyond the Danube in the early 370s to defend against the Sarmatians and Quadi residing in today’s Eastern Hungary.
It is likely the Romans could have conquered the lands of the Goths and Alamans had they, as Maximinus Thrax had begun to do for the inhabitants of the Western Greater German interior in 235-8, put their mind to it. They had, in fact, controlled the lands of the Alamans for two centuries prior to their loss of them during Aurelian’s reconquest of the Gallic Empire. However, their distractions by civil war, strategic desires to keep one’s frontiers guarded and supplied by patrol boats, and the consolidation of Roman identity around Mediterranids prevented this territorial expansion into Greater Germany from ever being put into practice.
The first four centuries of the Roman Empire witnessed the political degradation of the imperial system, especially in the traditionally less externally threatened West, as well as the rise of Eastern Greater Germany. The next century would witness the collapse of both Eastern Greater Germany and the Western Roman Empire. The Roman Uprising of the Five Barbarians, which, in China, happened almost immediately following their War of the Eight Princes, was postponed by just under a century. The Chinese Five Barbarians were the Xiongnu, Di, Jie, Qiang, and Xianbei. Their Roman counterparts were the Goths, Vandals, Sueves, Burgundians, and Franks. Only two of the five, the Goths (i.e., the Visigoths of Alaric and Euric) and Vandals, had any real importance in bringing about the Fall of the Western Empire. The Angles and Saxons did not directly fight and win against imperial authority and the Huns and Alans did not found any lasting kingdom on Roman soil, and so are not counted among the Five Barbarians.